Donald Trump says the city should not have settled with the Central Park Five, the five men wrongfully convicted of attacking a jogger. (Paul Morigi/WireImage)

Donald Trump wanted to give the Central Park Five the chair.

Now he doesn't want the city to give them a dime.

Advertisement

In an exclusive piece for the Daily News, Trump quoted an unnamed detective who called the $40 million settlement the city has agreed to pay the wrongfully convicted quintet "the heist of the century."

"The recipients must be laughing out loud at the stupidity of the city," Trump, who is worth about $4 billion, wrote. "Speak to the detectives on the case and try listening to the facts. These young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels."

Trump, who fanned the racial fury against the five black and Latino teens a quarter century ago with full-page ads demanding the death penalty, also expressed no remorse for his actions.

Instead, Trump wrote, "The justice system has a lot to answer for, as does the City of New York regarding this very mishandled disaster."

Raymond Santana's son Raymond Santana Jr. is one of the Central Park Five wrongfully convicted in the infamous 1989 rape. The defendants have settled their lawsuit against New York City for $40 million. (Marcus Santos/new york daily news)

"As citizens and taxpayers, we deserve better than this."

Contrast Trump's bluster with the words of Matias Reyes, the violent felon who confessed to raping and nearly killing the Central Park jogger.

Reyes expressed remorse Friday for the brutal attack — and for the five innocent teenagers who did time for his heinous crime.

"I am ashamed of what I did," Reyes told The News in a prison interview. "Every day I have to live with what I did to her."

"Those boys didn't do it," Reyes said at the Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Wallkill, N.Y.

Matias Reyes, who confessed to the attack, is serving time in prison. (William LaForce Jr.)

"The state I left her in — there couldn't have been anyone else and those boys couldn't have done anything to her," he said. "There's no way. They would have had to be sicker than me, the state I left her in."

Two of the doctors who treated victim Trisha Meili continue to maintain that Reyes, who was linked to the rape by his DNA, was not the only person who attacked her.

But dressed in green prison scrubs and a white T-shirt and speaking in a low, soft voice, Reyes insisted he acted alone when he pounced on Meili back on April 19, 1989.

"If these doctors are saying there was someone else or I used something else, it's news to me," he said. "I wish I could say, 'Okay you're right.' But all I can say is the truth: that I acted alone."

Reyes said people who still want to blame the five — Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Kharey Wise, Raymond Santana and Antron McCray — "just don't want to admit they got it wrong."

"Nobody could have done it and not had blood all on them and evidence on them," he said.

Meili, now 53, suffered a skull fracture and was left in a coma that lasted six weeks. She says she has no memory of what happened to her and did not return a call for comment.

Dr. Robert Kurtz, who oversaw Meili's recovery at Metropolitan Hospital, insists medical evidence suggests more than one person attacked her, though not necessarily the Central Park Five.

"She had five bleeding lacerations to her head," he said. "Three of them were raggedy, consistent with the use of some sort of blunt instrument such as a tree limb or bough that Reyes said he used."

But there were also "two lacerations on her scalp that were inflicted by a much sharper instrument — like a knife, or a piece of broken glass, or a rock with a sharp point on it."

Police are seen on April 20, 1989, searching the wooded area off the jogging path where a female jogger was assaulted, raped and dragged into the woods the night before. (David Handschuh/new york daily news)

Also, Kurtz said his colleague, Dr. Jane Haher, spotted hand prints on Meili's thighs and lower legs suggesting she was held down.

Reyes said he didn't use a knife.

"I struggled with the tree branch and then I used a rock," he said. "That was it."

Sarah Burns, who chronicled the case in her book "The Central Park Five," said she interviewed Kurtz as part of her research.

"I'm sure he believes that," Burns said of Kurtz. "It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I don't have any reason to disbelieve what Reyes described in detail."

Confessed rapist Matias Reyes is pictured during an interview with ABC. (ABC)

Earlier Friday, Santana's dad said the settlement won't get back the years his son lost in prison, but it just may buy some peace of mind.

"It should have been more," he told The News. "There were hard days and people were against them."

The relieved dad, who is also named Raymond Santana, said he and his family were treated like pariahs.

"I know it was bad for me," he added. "It was worse for them. My son lost his youth. He didn't get to be a young man."

Now, Raymond Santana Sr. said, he's relieved.

"Thank God it's over," he said. "Forget about the money. I'm just happy to take it out of my mind. It's the beginning of life again, everything's over, forget about all the pain."

So far neither Santana nor the others have said anything about the settlement.

Wise served nearly 13 years in prison. The others each served about seven years in prison.

Following their exonerations in 2002, they sued the city, claiming that they had been railroaded into making incriminating statements.

The Bloomberg administration fought to get the lawsuits dismissed, arguing that the city had acted with probable cause.